


A Date At The Amusement Park

by whoneedsapublisher



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: F/F, Mid-rebellion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 07:56:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19247032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whoneedsapublisher/pseuds/whoneedsapublisher
Summary: Sayaka Miki, a student at Mitakihara Middle School, is going on a date with her friend, Kyouko Sakura, a fellow student. But they're not just classmates! They live together, and they're both magical girls, who fight Nightmares!At least that's what Kyouko thinks. Sayaka, though, knows that there's more to the situation.





	A Date At The Amusement Park

Sayaka had her hands in the pockets of her coat as she trudged towards the park.

She was still a little dubious about all of this.

It wasn’t like she was taking advantage of Kyouko or anything. Homura’s world had changed their relationship, sure, making them live together and go to school together, but it wasn’t like Homura had brainwashed Kyouko to make her think of Sayaka differently. The only difference was that they didn’t have to start off on the wrong foot, like in all those timelines in the real world.

And this was why she’d come back, right? She regretted how things had ended with Kyouko. She regretted her selfish, myopic view of justice, how she’d condemned Kyouko without really understanding what she’d been through and why she’d become what she had. She wanted a new chance with her.

But… that chance had taken a turn she hadn’t quite expected. A romantic one. And now she was headed for a date with Kyouko at the amusement park.

Not that Kyouko had admitted it was a date. Even Sayaka was a little reluctant to say it out loud, but… it certainly seemed like a date.

If only she didn’t want to date Kyouko. That would be so much easier, wouldn’t it? She’d just blindly assume this was platonic, and Kyouko would probably eventually notice that Sayaka didn’t show any signs of being interested in her and drop the whole thing. And even if she didn’t, this whole world would probably fall apart before it became awkward.

But the problem was Sayaka _did_ want to date Kyouko.

She wasn’t sure when she’d started falling for her. It sure as hell wasn’t when she was alive. In the timeline she remembered most strongly, she probably hadn’t hated Kyouko by the end of her life, but her feelings hadn’t advanced to even fondness yet. But once she’d been rescued by Madoka- the law of cycles- and seen all the different pasts they’d lived, and seen Kyouko’s life, she’d started to see the kind, innocent girl who had been buried under tragedy and desperation, her idealism crushed by harsh reality and cruel fate. The rude, cruel, uncaring violent girl she’d met wasn’t who Kyouko was deep down, it was the persona she’d constructed to face the world. Suddenly, her previously inexplicable mercies and courtesies made sense. She’d tried to hurt Sayaka instead of killing hurt because she didn’t _want_ to kill her. She’d given Sayaka advice because she wanted her to end up better than Kyouko herself had.

And she’d died with her because she’d wanted Sayaka not to be alone.

But Kyouko, in this world, didn’t know any of that. In this timeline that Kyouko was from, none of it had happened. Her and Sayaka had been bickering partners who were just starting to become friends when Sayaka died. They hadn’t fought almost to the death. Kyouko hadn’t witnessed Sayaka’s fall into despair, hadn’t tried futility to pull her back from the edge, hadn’t saved her from Homura’s mercy.

And yet, even if this Kyouko wasn’t _exactly_ the Kyouko that Sayaka regretted leaving things on a bad note with, this Kyouko was still Kyouko. She was still charming despite being irritating, rude and inconsiderate but kind and compassionate despite that. The problem with her multifaceted perspective wasn’t the problem Homura had, where she’d become obsessed with an impossible long gone relationship between two people who no longer existed.

The problem was that Sayaka wasn’t who Kyouko thought.

Kyouko had thought she was asking out a girl who went to the same school with her. A fellow magical girl who fought nightmares. A friend who she lived with for convenience reasons (Homura apparently wasn’t aware of how unlikely the real Mr. and Mrs. Miki would be to consent to such an arrangement) and had grown closer to over time.

She didn’t know she was asking out an assistant of the law of cycles. A vessel for memories too dangerous for the incubators to be allowed to see until it was too late for them to try anything.

Was it fair to selfishly accept Kyouko’s affection because she wanted Kyouko to love her, when Kyouko’s only real affection was for the hollow vessel she was occupying to do her secretive job, the doll Homura had made to play her game of house with?

“Hey! Sayaka! Earth to Sayaka!”

Sayaka blinked. She’d arrived at the park while lost in thought, and now Kyouko was waving her hand in front of her face with her other hand on her hip, a skeptical look on her face.

“S-Sorry,” she said.

“Jeez, were you so excited that you didn’t get any sleep last night or something?” Kyouko said, grinning and putting her hands behind her.

“No!” Sayaka yelled, flushing. She’d slept last night! You know, at least a little…

“Oh yeah? Then why did I hear you tossing and turning last night?”

“Wouldn’t that mean _you_ were awake?!”

Their bickering continued until they reached the ticket gate, at which point hostilities ceased to deal with getting inside.

When she was actually _with_ Kyouko, she never thought about who they were and who she was. She was too distracted by the newest dumb thing Kyouko was doing, or the latest outrageous thing she’d said. She was kept too busy just enjoying their time together to contemplate it too much. But an hour or so in, Kyouko ran off the bathroom, and Sayaka was left alone with her worries again.

Was this fair?

She couldn’t escape from that question, no matter how many times she tried to justify it to herself. She couldn’t stop seeing Homura in her actions, in her willingness to pretend to be part of a world that she didn’t belong to.

By the time Kyouko came back, she’d resolved to do something about it. Of course, Kyouko immediately distracted her, and she fell back in their rhythm again, but the thought stayed with her. So, as the sun was starting to set and they sat together in the ferris wheel, looking out on the park below, she finally spoke up.

“Hey, Kyouko,” she said, looking out of the window to avoid meeting Kyouko’s eyes. “Have you ever wondered what kind of secrets people in our class might be hiding?”

“Huh?” Kyouko asked. Sayaka saw her blinking in confusion out of the corner of her eye. “Where’s _that_ coming from?”

“Jeez, just answer the question!” Sayaka snapped, flushing a little.

Kyouko frowned and scratched her head. “Iunno. I’m not that close to most of ‘em. Probably don’t even know most of the _not_ secret stuff about them, so why should I care about their secrets?”

“What if it was someone you did know, though,” Sayaka pressed, turning to face Kyouko and looking at her seriously. “What if was Mami or something?”

“Mami?” Kyouko pondered that for a moment. “She probably _does_ have some secrets. Like I bet she totally doesn’t keep up her refined nature when she’s alone at home or something, like she picks her toes.”

“Ewww,” Sayaka said, wrinkling her nose. “Anyway, that’s not what I meant. Wouldn’t you… wouldn’t you feel like you didn’t really know someone, if they were hiding something important?”

Kyouko grinned. “Nah,” she said, leaning back. “Who cares about that stuff, you know? If you hang out with someone, and you get along, and you fight side by side and see what they’re like under pressure, you know everything important, right? Who cares if they’re hiding some detail or another. You know who they are.”

Stupid.

It was dumb, naive thing to say. People could be fake, could be hiding their true nature, deceiving the people around them. Kyouko was too trusting. Too good natured. No wonder she’d been taken in by Kyubey. No wonder that she’d ended up betrayed by her own father when his dark side had shown itself.

“W-Woah, why are you crying all of a sudden?”

“I’m not crying!” Sayaka snapped, wiping tears from her eyes. “Stupid Kyouko.”

But if she thought that way… then she wasn’t in love with the shell of a life that Sayaka was controlling for her mission. She didn’t care that Sayaka was her classmate, or her roommate, or her teammate. She didn’t care about the half-there hazy backstory that Homura had slapped together. She cared about Sayaka.

“You totally are crying! What the heck, what’s gotten in you all of a sudden-”

Sayaka leapt forward and hugged Kyouko.

“Sayaka?!”

“Shut up,” Sayaka mumbled into her shoulder. “Just shut up for a minute.”

After a baffled silence, Kyouko wrapped her arms around Sayaka, and Sayaka closed her eyes.

Maybe… maybe it was okay just to enjoy this for what it was.

* * *

“I had a sickening dream. A dream where you were dead.”

Kyouko raised her spear slightly, back to back with Sayaka. Behind them, the cracks in the sky continued to splinter, nonsensical pieces of reality falling around them like twisted rain and bursting from ground in towering geysers of abstract matter.

“But you’re saying that was reality,” Kyouko continued, her face turned away from Sayaka. “And this right here, where we’re fighting side by side… is just a dream, Sayaka?”

Sayaka glanced over her shoulder at her and paused for a moment.

“This isn’t _just_ a dream,” she said. “It’s a little brighter than that.”

The world they lived in might be a constructed one, but it was still real. The souls pulled into Homura’s labyrinth were real people, even if they were surrounded by constructs. The events that took place were outside of normal reality, but they weren’t figments of Kyouko’s imagination, a fantasy that vanished on waking. Homura’s soul gem existed in the world, and the events inside it were really happened in that miniature dimension.

“I thought I didn’t have any regrets when I died,” Sayaka said, reaching out her hand to gently grasp Kyouko’s. Even through her glove, the warmth of Kyouko’s hand was comforting. It felt… right. “But the reason I ended up taking this assignment and coming back… was because I actually do have one regret.”

Sayaka smiled a little to herself.

“The fact that I left you behind.”

It felt good to finally say it. To give shape to the feelings that had eaten away at her for so long. Kyouko’s fingers intertwined with hers as she spoke, her warmth intensifying.

Even in the midst of all this chaos, she had this chance to share one last moment with the girl that she-

“I just wanted to eat cheese one more time!” Nagisa interjected, flying past.

Sayaka slumped, the quiet intimacy between the two of them spoiled in an instant.

“Hey! Way to ruin the moment!” she snapped at Nagisa, but even if Nagisa would have cared, she was already gone, sailing off to strike elsewhere.

Sayaka should be doing that as well. A little embarrassed, she leapt from her and Kyouko’s perch, drawing her swords again as she landed in a patch of enemies, slashing one aside before bringing up her guard again, surveying her opposition.

A moment later, Kyouko landed behind her.

“You dummy,” she said.

As the two of them fought together, Sayaka reconsidered her opinion on what Kyouko had said. Even if she didn’t know everything about Kyouko, and even if Kyouko didn’t know anything about her… maybe this rhythm, this natural ability to work with each other and fight as a pair… maybe that really was enough.

Maybe, just maybe, their feelings were as simple as they seemed.

 


End file.
